More Students Seen to Get NCLB Tutoring

More eligible children are getting free tutoring under the No Child Left Behind Act, but persistent implementation problems are hampering fuller participation, concludes a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Nineteen percent of the children who qualified for such “supplemental educational services” in the 2004-05 school year received the extra help, compared with 12 percent in 2003-04, according to the report, released Aug. 4. Federal law requires districts to provide tutoring for low-income children in schools that fail to meet their states’ academic goals for three consecutive years.

School districts are trying harder to inform parents of the service, but many still fall short of doing so effectively, the report says.

States are continuing to struggle to find appropriate ways of evaluating the performance of private tutoring providers, and those companies don’t always effectively align their instruction with that of the districts in which they are working, the report notes.